“You can’t outwit fate by standing on the sidelines placing little side bets about the outcome of life. Either you wade in and risk everything you have to play the game or you don’t play at all. And if you don’t play, you can’t win.”

Judith McNaught (Author of Someone Like You)

“No doubt, emotional intelligence is more rare than book smarts, but my experience says it is actually more important in the making of a leader. You just can’t ignore it.”

Jack Welsh (Former Chairman and CEO of General Electric)

“A ship is always safe at the shore – but that is NOT what it is built for.”

Albert Einstein (Nobel Laureate in Theoretical Physics)

I emptied my bank account and sent a $1,600 check to the magazine editor.

It was all the money I had left.

I had just spent the last six months interviewing sports athletes for a product I was going to release online.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The $1,600 was for a full-page product advertisement in a sports magazine.

I had no idea what I was doing.

Seriously—I was clueless.

I’d read a few outdated books on starting a business and creating an online product but that was about it.

I thought making something that other people wanted was going to be easy.

The $1,600 risk and 6-month time investment didn’t seem worth it at the time, but it was.

None of my future successes—publishing a best-selling book, speaking in 30 different countries, or managing a million-dollar product line—would have been possible without falling flat on my face first.

If you want to achieve goals quickly, you’re going to have to put yourself in uncontrolled environments.

You’re going to have to get uncomfortable.

In practical terms, this means being willing to speak up at work, be more disciplined at home, tell a negative friend goodbye, or spend your nights and weekends working on a personal project.

The key is learning how to think and act clearly in these uncertain environments.

Why Playing It Safe Is Irrational

Risk intolerance is a double-edged sword that drives people to play it safe.

Risk intolerance is what makes you unnecessarily conserve your efforts until the last moment, and it’s what makes you freeze up during that last moment.

This intolerance is something that negatively affects everyone in every field, from business, to sports, to personal lives.

Consider this example from professional golfing…

In golf, “par” is the number of strokes a first-class player should normally require for a particular hole, a “birdie” is playing a hole with a score of one stroke under par (good), and a “bogey” is playing a hole with a score of one stroke over par (bad).

A recent study reported in American Economic Review by two professors at the University of Pennsylvania showed that even the world’s best pro golfers are so consumed with avoiding bogeys that they make putts for birdie less often than identical-length putts for par.

In other words, pro golfers play it safe when they have two strokes to make par versus when they have only one stroke.

The study analyzed precise data on more than 1.6 million Pro Golf Tour putts, finding that this preference for avoiding a negative (bogey) over gaining a positive (birdie) costs the average pro golfer one stroke per tournament.

This doesn’t seem like much until you take into account that the top golfers on the Championship Tour are usually within one or two strokes of each other, and the average purse for the winner is 2 million dollars.

You can’t win big by playing it safe with a low risk tolerance. This is just as true in every part of your life.

3 Ways To Increase Risk Tolerance

The only way to accomplish bigger and better things in life is to become increasingly tolerant of risk.

The average person believes that manipulating his craps procedure, or how hard he throws the dice, will get him the numbers he wants.

Think of your colleague at work who obsessively guards the office thermostat, or the micro-manager boss who wants to see every slide of every PowerPoint presentation, or the relationship partner who wants the carpets vacuumed in exactly the right way so the vacuum lines are perfectly parallel.

Associating a specific procedure or skill to an uncertain situation can be empowering.

Instead of focusing on what you could lose, you’ll focus on what you could gain, which will increase your risk tolerance and help take logical, calculated risks. The key is to start being more comfortable with uncertainty and to learn to control the right things. By choosing your emotions and choosing to be emotionally intelligent overall, you’ll take on the right challenges at the right time. Do this and you’ll live a more confident and focused life.

To learn more about taking calculated risks and achieving your goals, and to get instant access to exclusive training videos, case studies, insider documents, and my private online network, get on the Escape Plan wait list.